Contributions to this post were provided by former CCC Council Member Kevin Fu from the University of Michigan.  The COVID-19 pandemic has caused staggering resource shortages around the world. A lack of personal protective equipment (PPE) is forcing medical centers and first responders to reuse N95 masks. Targeting the scarcity of N95 masks for healthcare workers, former Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council Member, Kevin Fu has joined the effort to address this global issue of PPE shortage. Fu is co-PI of the NSF Frontiers Trustworthy Health and Wellness project, founder and chief scientist of the Archimedes Center for Medical Device Security, and Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science […]

Hackers can use lasers to silently “speak” to any computer that receives voice commands, these include smartphones, Amazon Echo speakers, Google Homes, and Facebook’s Portal video chat devices. Former Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council member Kevin Fu, from the University of Michigan, and his collaborator Takeshi Sugawara, from the University of Tokyo, discovered that it is possible to make microphones respond to light as if it were sound.  This means that anything that acts on sound commands will act on light commands. They found that when they pointed a laser at a microphone and changed the intensity, the light would somehow perturb the microphone’s membrane at that same frequency. The […]

On June 2, our new CCC Council member starting July 1st, Kevin Fu (Associate Professor, Sloan Research Fellow Computer Science and Engineering Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan) was one of the five witnesses to testify to the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs at a hearing on “The IRS Data Break: Steps to Protect Americans’ Personal Information.” Fu recommend the following to the committee: Encourage research collaboration between cybersecurity experts and social and behavioral science to carry out human subjects experiments that measure the risks and benefits of knowledge-based authentication. A transcript of Fu’s oral testimony is here.  Visuals are here. A list of all the witnesses and their […]